Weekly Blog #10 - Third lockdown, University
Hi guys, marc back again with the 10th weekly blog, well it has been a bit longer than a week, sorry about that. Being inside all day really makes the days all blend together. Hope everyone had a great new year and is having a good start to the year, even though there is a lot going on in the world right now such as a third lockdown here in the UK and well, everything trump has been doing in America ... but we won't speak on that here as I absolutely hate politics. let's get into today's blog.
Third Lockdown
With all these lockdowns I'm not going to lie, it feels as if It went from march to January in the blink of an eye! Although I have sort have of got used to them (they just feel like a holiday and part of the year now), I cant wait to get back to life as normal and I bet you guys are feeling the same way. In order to take my mind off of the impending doom of a global pandemic slowly getting worse by the day I have decided that revision and running will take basically take over every aspect of my life for the foreseeable future because you know, not much else to do.
I have been revising like crazy because I wanna keep ahead of my modules. One way I have done this is to start reading, a lot. I just finished 'Introduction to Machine Learning' by Ethem Alpaydin and it has some amazing examples and explanations of all the aspects that machines learning from Supervised / Unsupervised learning to clustering and all sorts of interesting topics! Definitely Recommend. A module I have next term is 'Computer security' so I have taken the book 'Security in Computing' which is actually part of my reading list for next term in order to get a head start. A lot of it is information I already knew like authorization, encryption, etc but it also is a gold mine for a lot of extremely useful and interesting topics.
As well as running, during the summer I ran a ton during the first lockdown and nearly built to half a marathon then I started traveling for work and unfortunately didn't have time. However, now going back into a lockdown I have a ton of time to start the weight lifting and running again from home. I and my friends use Starva and we all track each other runs, sorta make it a competition to see who runs the furthest, atm I'm winning purely because I'm the only one idiotic enough to go run for 5 miles in -1 weather, although it's really nice doing it in the cold and running to your warm-up.
University
Univerisity is basically the same, all online from home at 9k a year. I didn't really expect anything to change with how people are dealing with it, On one hand, people are pissed and wanna get back to living their lives but on the other hand, they can't because they will most likely get covid and become seriously ill. We are basically at the point of no return with how much damage covid has done to the economy and other things. All we can do is just stick to the rules and wait for the vaccine to get rolled out.
I can't wait to get back to a lecture hall thought, last year I didn't really go to the lecturer as I found them basically useless but I will be going to every single one when back and just will be appreciated not having to do it from my bedroom. One tool I hope to use when we go back is an Ipad. I love writing my notes on paper and out with a pen but doing it on an iPad where I can organize it and have only that to carry around will be huge and really great, not sure if it will be that tablet yet but do wanna get one for when we go back to normal and face to face teaching.
That concludes this week's blog, hope your guys enjoyed it! byyyyeeee